Vignette 1: Jamal

Shane is a 12-year-old student in sixth grade. He lives with his maternal grandmother and younger brother, where he has lived since he was 3. Prior to being legally placed with his grandmother, Shane and his brother were exposed to neglect and abuse. His grandmother reports that Shane has always been a “good boy” but that he struggled in school because he has a hard time focusing and staying motivated. Shane has no known disabilities; he performs better when he is interested in the material, receives consistent feedback, and feels confident in his abilities. Shane has also performed better in school when he has a good relationship with his teachers. In fifth grade, Shane got along particularly well with his teacher, Mr. Jones. Shane perceived Mr. Jones as “cool, caring, and fun,” and Mr. Jones felt he understood and could relate to Shane. Now that Shane is in sixth grade, he switches classes and therefore has multiple teachers. Shane feels that none of his teachers like him. He believes his teachers do not care whether he does well and find him a nuisance. He reports that he does not trust his teachers or care about school anymore, although he likes getting to “hang out” with his friends during lunch and recess. Shane has started skipping classes, especially the ones he feels most strongly like he doesn’t belong. His teachers and grandmother have tried to get him “back on track” by threatening detentions or taking away privileges if he exhibits a “bad attitude,” but “tough love” and punitive discipline haven’t worked.

Discussion: In which subtype of engagement does Shane need support? What factors are negatively impacting Shane’s affective engagement? What universal supports could have been delivered to prevent Shane from becoming affectively disengaged in school? What targeted supports could be delivered to promote Shane’s affective disengagement?

Vignette 2: Sarah

Sarah is a 9-year-old student in fourth grade who attends a public school in a suburb of a large metropolitan area. Her parents are going through a divorce and are currently sharing custody of Sarah, who is an only child. Sarah is an above-average student, and although she is highly conscientious, she often takes longer to complete tasks than her peers because she is concerned about “not doing a good job.” Sarah is shy and gets along better with adults than with her peers. For this reason, some students in her class started calling her “brown nose,” and she has subsequently become the target of more severe bullying. She reported that students call her “dummy” because she requires extra time on some assignments, despite participating in accelerated math and reading. She also gets made fun of for her above-average height and for dressing like a “tomboy.” Sarah’s parents report that she comes home from school many days of the week in tears, stating “I have no friends” and “everybody hates me,” begging not to go back. They have allowed her to skip school on several occasions, but they are worried that it is now becoming a habit. When asked, Sarah says that school is not a safe place and she feels like nobody likes her or wants to be her friend.

Discussion: In which subtype of engagement does Sarah need support? What factors are negatively impacting Sarah’s affective engagement? What universal supports could have been delivered to prevent Sarah from becoming affectively disengaged in school? What targeted supports could be delivered to promote Sarah’s affective disengagement?

Affective Engagement as a Target for Prevention and Intervention

Student motivation is one of the most significant concerns to educators and parents, as it is at the heart of academic success (Hidi & Harackiewicz, 2000). To better understand student motivation, researchers have examined specific engagement processes that impact student motivation and performance in school (Christenson, Reschly, & Wylie, 2012). In particular, affective engagement has received attention as a critical facet that serves to activate and arouse students’ motivation to exhibit desired behaviors that enable success in school (e.g., active participation in class discussion, showing up to class on time, respectful conversations with others). Conversely, research has examined types of school experiences that negatively impact student affective engagement, such as negative interactions with teachers, punitive exclusionary discipline, bullying and harassment, and repeated academic failure (Cook, Williams, Guerra, Kim, & Sadek, 2010; Henry & Huizinga, 2007; Okonofua, Walton, & Eberhardt, 2016).

There is a large body of evidence demonstrating that affective engagement and closely related constructs are important predictors of success in school. Affective engagement underpins the specific trajectories students are likely to follow through school. For example, a strong argument can be made that the long-standing achievement gaps that exist for students of color are explained in large part by gaps in affective engagement (Voight, Hanson, O’Malley, & Adekanye, 2015). That is, students of color who are lagging behind their White classmates are likely to experience a lower sense of belonging, greater mistrust, and more intense negative emotions (e.g., frustration; Hughes & Kwok, 2007; Mattison & Aber, 2007). This makes sense considering findings that indicate students of color tend to have weaker and more problematic relationships with teachers, receive disproportionate exposure to punitive discipline, and experience more microaggressions from others than their White classmates (Bottiani, Bradshaw, & Mendelson, 2014; Carter, Skiba, Arredondo, & Pollock, 2017; Sue, Capodilupo, & Holder, 2008). General claims of institutional discrimination and negative stereotypes can be levied to explain these experiences, but at the root of these experiences is a self-perpetuating cycle of affective disengagement between student and school. Thus, to close the achievement gaps, students of color need to be afforded greater opportunities for exposure to positive experiences in school that promote their affective engagement. This, consequently, would improve overall affective school climate for certain subgroups of students who experience long-standing achievement gaps (e.g., Black males, students with disabilities, Native American students).

Affective engagement is closely related to the notion of school climate, as climate reflects how students think about, feel toward, and ultimately describe their experiences in school (Wang & Degol, 2016). In many ways, school climate represents the aggregate or collection of individual students’ affective engagement, seeing as many of the qualities of healthy school climates—e.g., safe, civil, and nonpunitive environments toward students, sense of belonging, and established relationships between teachers and students and their parents—are also dimensions associated with affective engagement (Cohen, McCabe, Michelli, & Pickeral, 2009). School climate has been linked to a host of positive academic-related outcomes, including students’ self-concept (Cairns, 1987), prevention of substance abuse and behavioral health problems (LaRusso, Romer, & Selman, 2008; Ruus et al., 2007), and psychological well-being (Ruus et al., 2007; Shochet, Dadds, Ham, & Montague, 2006). Diminished affective engagement at the individual student level and negative school climate at the collective level portend both short- and long-term outcomes in school. Considering all the above, affective engagement is important for educators including administrative leaders to consider from both a prevention and an intervention standpoint.

Defining Affective Engagement and Its Core Components

Affective engagement is a multidimensional, overlapping concept that can be difficult to understand; it is often confused with other concepts (e.g., trust) and engagement types (e.g., cognitive engagement). Hence, the implications it has for school-based prevention and intervention may be underutilized. Dissecting and defining each of its terms provides greater definitional clarity and understanding of its implications for intervention. Affective is an adjective that means causing emotions or feelings. Engagement refers to being engaged in an activity, task, or experience. Thus, when considered together, affective engagement could be defined as emotions and feelings that lead a person to be engaged in an activity, task, or experience. Stated in simpler terms, affective engagement captures how a student feels about being in school (Finn & Rock, 1997). When considering this, any action—intentional or not—by educators, peers, or features of the school environment (e.g., physical aesthetics of the school building) that cause students to have positive feelings (e.g., joy, gratitude, interest, safety) while in school promotes affective engagement.

Affective engagement encompasses both students’ positive and negative emotional experiences in school (Appleton, Christenson, & Furlong, 2008). When affective engagement is high, students experience and report positive emotions that underlie internal motivation to maintain behavioral engagement in school activities and classroom learning experiences (Goodenow, 1991; Voelkl, 1997). Feeling a sense of physical and emotional safety in school, for instance, is an aspect of affective engagement that reflects a student’s internal reaction to the broader climate of a school which, in turn, is linked to student academic engagement and prosocial functioning (Devine & Cohen, 2007). Affective engagement captures a range of students’ emotional reactions (e.g., happiness, joy, boredom, frustration, and anxiety) that may manifest differentially in certain settings (e.g., English class) and situations (e.g., small group) or with particular people (e.g., a certain teacher; Reschly & Christenson, 2012).

Affective engagement is related to but distinct from cognitive and behavioral engagement. Often, affective engagement and cognitive engagement combine to impact behavioral engagement, as the way students think about school is likely to impact how they feel and vice versa. Whereas cognitive engagement represents the thoughts and cognitive content a student has about their schooling experiences, affective engagement involves emotional reactions to experiences that produce favorable or unfavorable feelings toward a place, person, situation, or activity. However, the interplay between cognition and affect is a complicated one, as they both represent internal, subjective experiences. The content and intensity of a student’s thoughts may arouse aligned emotions; likewise, emotions beget certain thoughts. Together, these exert an influence on behavior (Dolan, 2002).

Understanding Emotions to Promote Affective Engagement

To fully understand the concept of affective engagement and how it manifests in students, it is important to understand emotions and how emotions influence decision-making and behavior. Educators who develop an understanding of emotions, how emotions manifest in school, and the specific prevention and intervention practices under their control to implement are in a better position to impact student affective engagement as a way of improving behavior and performance in school. Most theoretical models of emotion stipulate that emotions are linked to specific action tendencies; that is, the emotional reaction to a certain situation increases the probability of behaving in certain ways (Jenkins & Oatley, 1996; Lazarus, 1991; Levenson, 1994). Emotions represent internal subjective experiences in response to a perceived or actual event (see Scherer (2001) for a model of cognitive appraisal of emotion). Emotions are largely physiological or somatic reactions that have motivational properties that affect behavior. For example, anger is the internal subjective experience that increases a person’s motivation to attack or defend. While appropriate channeling of anger is likely to lead to asserting one’s self, difficulties managing anger can manifest problematically in the form of aggressive behavior (i.e., intention to cause psychological, emotional, or physical harm to others). Conversely, emotions related to joy often lead a person to be more open and willing to take on and stick with novel or challenging activities, which is at the heart of what educators hope for from their students (Yeager & Dweck, 2012).

Negative and Positive Emotions

In the area of emotion research, there are differences in the types of emotions people experience. One straightforward and empirically supported way to conceptualize emotions is to classify them as negative or positive (Green, 1992). Negative emotions are not inherently bad and positive emotions are not necessarily good. Rather, negative and positive refer to the impact these emotions have on individuals somatically, cognitively, and behaviorally. Negative emotions are those that accompany an unpleasant or aversive physiological and cognitive reaction, such that a person could label the emotion as fear, anger, shame, embarrassment, sorrow, guilt, sadness, or hate. Given the nature of negative emotions, they tend to narrow attentional focus and shrink the repertoire of behavior the person feels motivated to exhibit. For example, a student who experiences intense anxiety (e.g., butterflies in belly, accelerated heart rate, shorter breathing) in school is likely fixated on a particular feared stimulus (e.g., being picked on) and thus likely to feel motivated to engage behaviors to avoid the feared stimulus (e.g., complain of feeling sick and go to nurse’s office).

The narrowing of attention and behavior can be helpful in certain situations in which there is a bona fide threat. Indeed, there are numerous situations in life when negative emotions are justified and proportional to the situation. For example, would the Civil Rights Movement ever happen without people experiencing anger? The social injustice that was occurring at a societal and individual level at the time of the Civil Rights Movement resulted in negative emotional responses for particular groups of people that increased their motivation to engage in actions to produce a more just and equitable society. This same anger can be observed in classrooms when students feel mistreated (e.g., disrespected) and ostracized by their teacher or peers. The inability to manage that anger, though, could result in the person engaging in behaviors that make the situation worse for themselves or others for whom they care about (e.g., violence). Thus, there is a need for students to be able to manage anger and frustration in response to circumstances that arise in school to avoid behaviors that make the situation worse for themselves (e.g., verbal aggression, threat, or academic avoidance) and lead to more helpful, hopeful, and productive behaviors.

Negative emotions become particularly problematic when they are extreme or intense, chronic or prolonged, or not proportional or justified given the situation (Nock & Mendes, 2008). Thus, promoting students’ affective engagement requires minimizing situations that provoke extreme or intense negative emotional reactions (e.g., teacher embarrasses student in front of peers), responding to and supporting students who are experiencing prolonged negative emotions, and teaching students how to regulate their emotions in response to unwanted situations that arise in the context of school. Given that difficulties with managing negative emotions lead to the development of diagnosable problems (e.g., anxiety disorders, depressive disorders), researchers and practitioners have placed a lopsided emphasis on addressing negative emotions relative to promoting positive emotions. However, over the past two decades, there has been a surge of interest in positive emotions and how they contribute to resiliency and flourishment (Fredrickson & Joiner, 2002; Renshaw, Long, & Cook, 2015).

Positive emotions represent the other side of the emotional coin. If negative emotions narrow attention and behavior, positive emotions have been argued to broaden attention and behavior (Fredrickson, 2013). Indeed, positive emotions are those that are accompanied by pleasant internal subjective experiences (physiological and cognitive), such as joy, pride, enjoyment, awe, amusement, gratitude, interest, fun, and love. Barbara Fredrickson is a pioneer in the science of positive emotions who developed the broaden-and-build theory that suggests that positive emotions (e.g., joy and awe) broaden a person’s awareness and encourage more exploration, problem-solving, and expansive thoughts and actions. Stated differently, when experienced, positive emotions expand a person’s actions, leading them to be open to a wider range of cognitive and behavioral pursuits than would normally occur (Fredrickson, 2001). When viewed from this perspective, positive emotions have significant implications for everyday practice in schools. Intentionally cultivating positive emotional experiences may not just cause students to feel good in school; it may also serve as a means to enable students to grow socially and academically over time. For example, students who receive strategic praise from their teachers based on effort, perseverance, problem-solving, or a specific behavior are more likely to feel a sense of connection and trust with the teacher (Yeager & Walton, 2011), which leads to improved academic performance (Allday et al., 2012).

Ultimately, to promote affective engagement via prevention and intervention practices, the aim is for educators to strategically and intentionally focus on inducing positive emotional experiences to broaden and build students’ academic engagement and performance, mitigate negative emotional experiences that undermine affective engagement (e.g., bullying and punitive experiences), and equip students with the skills to regulate their emotions in the face of the social and academic demands of school.

Multitiered Approach to Improving Student Affective Engagement

In recognition of the impact of social, emotional, and behavioral functioning on academic success, schools are being increasingly pressured to adopt programs and practices that prevent these problems (Adelman & Taylor, 2006; Kutash, Duchnowski, & Lynn, 2006; Wagner & Davis, 2006). A series of federal reports (e.g., National Research Council, 2009; President’s New Freedom Commission on Mental Health, 2003; Satcher, 2000) and landmark legislation (IDEA, 2004) have identified the promotion of student social, emotional, and behavioral well-being as a top priority for schools. Multitiered systems of support (MTSS) has been advocated as a framework to efficiently and effectively organize and deliver a continuum of evidence-based practices to promote students’ academic, social, emotional, and behavioral functioning and enable educators to make timely and relevant data-driven decisions (Cook et al., 2010). MTSS involves the delivery of a continuum of supports, including universal (i.e., Tier 1) supports for all students, selected (Tier 2) interventions for some students who express a need above and beyond Tier 1, and intensive indicated (Tier 3) interventions for students with higher needs who are nonresponsive to lesser supports. Each tier consists of several strategies for addressing needs that cross the various micro- and mesosystemic factors influencing student behavior. Data-based decision-making is involved through the collection of universal screening, progress monitoring, and measurement of fidelity (i.e., the degree to which the program, practice, or intervention is delivered as planned). From 2007, the percentage of K-12 district administrators striving to adopt and implement an MTSS framework rose dramatically from 24% to 94% (Spectrum K12, 2011). Figure 12.1 depicts a continuum of supports that could be integrated into a school’s MTSS framework to promote student affective engagement. In this chapter, the focus is on the first two tiers to describe the universal supports for all students as a way of promoting affective engagement—an asset that both buffers students from experiencing school-related problems and promotes targeted interventions for some students who could benefit from receiving additional support.

Fig. 12.1
A multi-tiered framework to promote affective engagement. A triangle has universal below with Tier 1 for ALL, Selected Tier 2 for Some, Intensive Tier 3 for a Few.

Example MTSS framework to promote affective engagement

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Measuring Indicators of Affective Engagement

A critical aspect of MTSS is data-driven decision-making. Although there is not widespread consensus on the indicators that comprise affective engagement, prior research has identified several broad indicators that capture dimensions of this construct for purposes of measurement (Reschly & Christenson, 2012). An indicator is a sub-factor that when combined with other indicators captures the main construct of interest (i.e., affective engagement). Although it is beyond the scope of this chapter to dive deeply into the broad indicators and specific sub-factors of affective engagement (see Chaps. 2 and 3 for more detail), Table 12.1 provides an overview of four broad indicators of affective engagement (school connectedness, subjective emotional well-being, feelings toward academics, and sense of safety), with corresponding sub-factors linked to general recommendations for prevention and intervention. As one can see in Table 12.1, all of the broader indicators of affective engagement represent malleable targets for prevention and intervention practices. For example, students’ feelings of school connectedness can be measured via a number of sub-factors, with clear links to prevention and intervention practices that attempt to improve interactions and relationships among staff and students. Moreover, subjective emotional well-being, defined as a student’s affective evaluations of school life, represents a broad indicator of affective engagement. This indicator could be measured and addressed via practices that aim to improve both students’ skills to regulate negative emotions in response to distressing situations (e.g., academic failure, peer conflict, reprimand by a teacher) and students’ development of habits linked to inducing positive emotions (e.g., gratitude practices). Feelings toward academics represents another indicator that captures students’ feelings of frustration and boredom when engaging in academic work, which can be assessed and intervened upon to improve student affective engagement. Additionally, students’ sense of safety in school is a commonly measured indicator of affective engagement that is necessary for schools to address as a significant barrier to student learning.

Table 12.1 Broad indicators, sub-factors, and example intervention targets of affective engagement
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Affective engagement can be tricky to measure due to its internal subjective nature (Duckworth & Yeager, 2015). Thus, to know whether a student is affectively engaged requires paying close attention to students’ affective responses and skillfully gathering information from them about their perceptions of school (Wang & Degol, 2016). Due to the internal subjective nature of affective engagement, educators often do not know how students feel about school unless they ask them and students provide a truthful and accurate account of their feelings. Thus, to measure affective engagement requires student perception and voice instruments that attempt to elicit students’ thoughts and feelings about school (Fredricks & McColskey, 2012). Although student self-report is a reliable and valid way to assess student engagement (Fredricks et al., 2011), developmentally speaking, students third grade and lower often are less reliable informants of their internal subjective experiences (Surber, 1984). In this case, other informants (e.g., teachers and parents) and methods (e.g., interviews, observations) become useful sources of data regarding indicators of affective engagement.

Measuring student affective engagement is important for informing and monitoring the impact of prevention and intervention efforts as well as facilitating data-driven decisions at school-wide, classroom, and individual student levels. From a measurement standpoint, there are existing tools that include broadband scales that assess dimensions of engagement specifically, such as the Student Engagement Instrument (SEI; Appleton, Christenson, Kim, & Reschly, 2006). There are also existing tools that measure affective engagement as part of a more comprehensive school climate assessment, such as the Social-Emotional Health Survey (Furlong, You, Renshaw, Smith, & O’Malley, 2014), Panorama Assessment (Panorama Education, 2018), and Authoritative School Climate Survey (Cornell, 2014). Additionally, there are narrowband measures that assess specific factors of affective engagement, including the Teacher-Student Relationship Questionnaire (Pianta, 2001), Student Subjective Wellbeing Questionnaire (Renshaw et al., 2015), and Positive and Negative Affect Scale (PANAS; Watson, Clark, & Tellegen, 1988) that can be used for purposes of informing and monitoring the impact of prevention and intervention efforts.

Universal Approaches to Promoting Affective Engagement

The foundation of MTSS is the universal level of support, which entails the delivery of evidence-based programs and practices to all students with the goal of preventing escalation of problems and enhancing success-promoting factors (Cook et al., 2010). Given the prevalence and impact of academic, social, emotional, and behavioral problems on student short-term and long-term success, there is an increased need for schools to implement population-based practices to prevent problems that result in negative school and life outcomes (Greenberg & Abenavoli, 2017). Moreover, universal supports have been shown to exhibit three types of effects: prevention (i.e., preventing the emergence of problems that undermine academic success), promotion (i.e., enhancing acquisition of strengths and assets linked to optimal school performance), and treatment (i.e., remediating problems among students experiencing social and/or academic difficulties). A number of programs and practices have demonstrated evidence supporting their impact on broad and specific indicators of student affective engagement. These universal supports include teacher-student relationship approaches, school-wide positive behavior intervention and supports (SWPBIS), social-emotional learning (SEL), bullying prevention, and threat assessment.

Teacher-Student Relationship Approaches

Strong teacher-student relationships have long been considered a foundational aspect of a positive school experience (Brophy & Good, 1974). Most students spend more time during the week with their teachers than with any other adult in their lives outside of their families. Multiple studies have illustrated the association between teacher-student relationship quality and future social and academic performance across childhood and adolescence (Allen, Pianta, Gregory, Mikami, & Lun, 2011; Hamre & Pianta, 2001; Wu, Hughes, & Kwok, 2010). Research has also shown that positive teacher-student relationships may have protective effects for students who experience learning and behavioral problems (Baker, 2006; Bierman, 2011) and that children who exhibit externalizing problems in the classroom often have weaker relationships with their teachers (Fowler, Banks, Anhalt, Der, & Kalis, 2008). Below we describe the Establish, Maintain, Restore approach to building strong teacher-student relationships to ensure that every student feels a sense of belonging and trust with their teachers.

Establish-Maintain-Restore

Establish-Maintain-Restore is a free, open-access approach to cultivating positive teacher-student relationships (Cook, Coco, et al., 2018) that has been evaluated in two separate randomized controlled trials (Cook, Fiat et al., 2018; Duong et al., 2019). EMR is grounded in prior theory and empirical research to serve as an intentional approach based on three dynamic phases of any relationship that develops and sustains over time to be characterized by feelings of mutual trust, respect, and belonging: (1) relationship formation, (2) relationship maintenance, and (3) relationship restoration. These phases are arranged sequentially as a heuristic that enables educators in a given school to adopt a common language around relationships. This facilitates more intentional and strategic decision-making (e.g., responding with empathy, making room on their plate for building relationships) about educators’ relationship standing with students and, ultimately, the delivery of specific concrete relational practices to either establish, maintain, or restore with students (see Table 12.2). The ultimate aim is to move all students away from the two undesirable (i.e., not the final destination) relationship states (i.e., establish and restore) toward maintain, which indicates that the students feel a sense of trust, belonging, and understanding toward those who are in charge of the setting in which they are expected to perform (e.g., teacher).

Table 12.2 Menu of Establish-Maintain-Restore practices
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To facilitate implementation of EMR, five implementation supports are deployed to encourage teacher adoption and delivery of EMR practices. First, there is a need to engage in important preparation work with the site leadership team (i.e., principal and other informal leaders) to integrate implementation of EMR into the school improvement plan, connect the delivery of EMR practices to end of the year teacher performance evaluations, and message the importance of teacher-student relationships as it relates to the overall mission of the school. Second, a 3- to 4-hour training is delivered to all teachers to increase their knowledge of EMR and provide opportunities to practice and ask clarifying questions. Third, after training, weekly tips and reminder emails are sent to prompt teachers to increase their awareness of opportunities to use the EMR and continue knowledge development around specific EMR practices. Fourth, monthly professional learning communities (PLCs) meetings are scheduled, protecting time for teachers to collaborate with one another and reflect on their relationship standing with students and to develop relationship action plans. In the PLCs, teachers use class rosters to reflect on their relational status with each of their students (i.e., whether their relationship with the student is in the Establish, Maintain, or Restore Phase; see the Appendix for an example roster template). Subsequently, teachers use this information to plan the delivery of specific practices with particular students and receive feedback from their colleagues regarding their plan. Fifth, fidelity checks and student voice/input data are gathered to provide teachers with feedback regarding implementation and to develop school-wide goals regarding improving the quality of relationships with students in the building.

Establish

The initial phase of EMR involves intentional efforts to establish relationships with students. The goal at the student level is to ensure that all students feel a sense of belonging that is characterized by trust, connection, and understanding. Teachers are provided with a menu of established practices they can select from to implement with particular students. The key practice during this phase is to schedule individual time (i.e., Banking Time) with specific students for whom they believe lack a sense of trusting, belonging, and understanding. Banking Time (Chap. 14) consists of a student-led activity and conversation in which the teacher adopts a stance that is nondirective, validating, and responsive to the student’s actions and feelings (Driscoll & Pianta, 2010; Hamre & Pianta, 2001; Williford, Maier, Downer, Pianta, & Howes, 2013). This is discussed in greater detail in a subsequent chapter in this book. The teacher uses a variety of communication techniques, such as open-ended questions, reflective listening, validation/empathy statements, and expressions of enthusiasm/interest, which are considered to be at the heart of effective relationship building. The underlying premise of Banking Time is best understood using a bank metaphor: The teacher intentionally engages in interactions with the student to make deposits into the relationship. This not only cultivates a sense of connection but also provides the relational context that enables the teacher to make strategic withdrawals from the student, such as providing constructive feedback, encouraging the student to engage in a less preferred activity or assignment, or responding to attempts to correct problem behavior. Other establish practices include secondhand compliments (i.e., delivering strategic compliments/praise to the student through another person), positive greetings and farewells upon entering and exiting class each day (Cook, Fiat, et al., 2018), relationship logs to reference and acknowledge important information about the particular student, and the 2 by 10 strategy that involves engaging the student in relationship building conversation for a minimum of 2 minutes for 10 consecutive days.

Maintain

Once a relationship is established with the student, teachers focus on maintaining their relationship with students through ongoing patterns of positive interactions. Without intentional attention to maintaining relationships, research indicates that relationship quality can deteriorate over time as the ratio of positive to negative interactions naturally diminishes (Steinberg, 2001). As a result, over time if educators are not careful, their interactions may unintentionally involve higher rates of nags, complaints, reprimands, ignoring bids for attention, or negative judgments than positive interactions, which undermines the health of the relationship (Gottman & Levenson, 2000). Maintaining a positive relationship, therefore, requires deliberate attention to the rates of positive interactions relative to negative ones with students. The primary practice associated with the Maintain Phase is the 5-to-1 ratio of positive to negative interactions. That is, teachers reflect on and strive to exhibit positive interactions with students (e.g., general compliments, behavior-specific praise statements, acknowledging appropriate bids for attention, demonstrating empathy when a student is upset, asking questions to inquire how a student is doing, laughing with students not at them) at least five times for every one negative interaction (e.g., reprimand, complaint, disapproving statement, or punitive interaction; Flora, 2000). Research has shown the positive impact of the 5-to-1 ratio to improve student subjective feelings and classroom behavioral engagement (Cook et al., 2017). The 5-to-1 ratio is included in the Maintain Phase because in order for a teacher’s attention and recognition to be reinforcing, the student has to trust, respect, and value the relationship with the teacher (Maag, 2001). Outside the context of a trusting relationship, attempts to positively interact with others could be viewed as self-serving or disingenuous (Crosnoe, Johnson, & Elder Jr, 2004). Additionally, other maintenance strategies are encouraged such as brief relationship “check-ins,” responding to a problem behavior with empathy, and random acts of care/kindness (e.g., leaving a note for the student, giving a small gift).

Restore

Due to the fact that all healthy relationships involve some degree of conflict that necessitate repair, a critical relational phase of EMR is restore. This is critical because negative interactions can weaken a relationship with a student, resulting in students feeling a lower sense of belonging and connection, being less responsive to efforts to correct problem behaviors, and becoming more challenging to motivate to take on academic work that she/he perceives to be challenging or boring. The Restore Phase emphasizes the R3method, which consists of educators reconnecting with students following a negative interaction to repair any harm through skillful communication to restore the relationship back to its previous positive state. Indeed, restorative practices in schools provide a model for rebuilding of the student-teacher relationship after disruption, conflict, or harm has occurred in the relationship. While research on restorative conferencing in schools is limited (Anfara Jr, Evans, & Lester, 2013), there is preliminary evidence that engaging in restorative efforts contributes to improvements in relationships between students and teachers (Cameron & Thorsborne, 2001). Teachers are supported to increase their awareness and recognition of situations (e.g., argument with the student, delivery of a punitive consequence) and cues (e.g., change in behavior such as lack of eye contact, ignoring instructions, arguing/debating) that indicate a need to restore the relationship through a restorative interaction. Once a student is deemed in need of restoration, teachers reconnect with the student and select from one or more of the following restore communication techniques: (1) letting go of previous interaction for students who think the adult is going to have a grudge against them, (2) taking responsibility/ownership for the problem for students who believe the adult is unwilling to admit a mistake, (3) empathy statement to validate student feelings or motives underlying behavior, (4) collaborative problem-solving to identify a mutually agreed-upon solution, or (5) statement of care by separating the deed from the doer. To be feasible, restorative conversations should be relatively brief and should be delivered privately and at a time of convenience for the teacher.

Students who are able to establish and maintain positive teacher-student relationships are likely to experience short-term improvements in affective engagement, as well as important downstream benefits, such as improved academic achievement (Eccles et al., 1993). Students who thrive in school are not only able to cultivate positive relationships with their teachers but also their peers (Wentzel, 1998). There is a need for additional supports that equip students with the knowledge and skills to interact successfully with others and regulate their emotions in response to the social and academic demands in school.

Social and Emotional Learning (SEL)

There is growing recognition among those involved in education that social and emotional well-being is instrumental to academic success (Every Student Succeeds Act 2015). Advocates of social-emotional learning (SEL) have pushed schools to expand their conceptualization of teaching and learning to include an emphasis on supporting students to acquire critical social and emotional knowledge and skills that enable better self-regulation to meet the current social and academic challenges in school as well as the eventual demands of civic, career, and private aspects of adult life (National Research Council, 2013). The emphasis on SEL is in part due to the convincing evidence demonstrating that social and emotional competencies are critical for academic success (Durlak, Weissberg, Dymnicki, Taylor, & Schellinger, 2011; Heckman & Kautz, 2012; Levin, 2012), but also to economic analyses highlighting that SEL efforts produce a significant return on investment. In fact, it has been estimated that benefits of delivering SEL programs with fidelity outweigh the financial costs by a ratio of 11 to 1 (Heckman & Masterov, 2007). Consistent with this push, thousands of schools nationwide are adopting and implementing SEL programs to promote both academic and social-emotional outcomes of children (Osher et al., 2016).

Although most SEL standards do not explicitly reference the term affective engagement, affective engagement is an important outcome of SEL programming. In general, SEL is a curricular approach that consists of teaching students core social-emotional competencies related to identifying and regulating their emotions, setting and working to achieve positive goals, demonstrating empathy and understanding of the perspectives of others, cultivating and sustaining positive relationships, making socially responsible decisions, and managing interpersonal conflicts constructively (Zins, Bloodworth, Weissberg, & Walberg, 2007). A recent meta-analysis of 213 studies examining the impact of social-emotional learning (SEL) indicated that SEL curricula are not only associated with significant improvements in students’ social-emotional skills, but they were associated with an average 11 percentile increase in academic achievement (Durlak et al., 2011). When considering the different SEL programs on the market, there are some that are more focused on promoting emotional competency and, thus, are arguably better suited to promote affective engagement. That being said, no research has compared SEL programs and, thus, no one SEL program has emerged as superior to others.

RULER SEL Program

RULER is an example of an evidence-based SEL program with close links to affective engagement (Brackett & Rivers, 2014). It is grounded in emotional intelligence (EI; Salovey & Mayer, 1990), which refers to a subset of skills that enable individuals to increase their awareness, ability to act on emotions adaptively, and management of more intense emotions. RULER represents an acronym that captures the five core skills taught as part of the program: recognizing emotion in the self and others, understanding the causes and consequences of emotions, labeling emotions with a diverse and accurate vocabulary, expressing emotions constructively across contexts, and regulating emotions effectively. EI is taught through specific tools and curriculum. The main tools are the mood meter, charter, and meta-moments. The mood meter involves students checking in and rating their pleasantness and energy levels, which places each student in one of four quadrants (e.g., +2 pleasantness and −2 energy = peaceful). Ultimately, the mood meter is utilized to enhance students’ ability to recognize and label emotions, as well as utilize specific emotional regulation strategies to move their mood to a more desirable state. The charter is an agreement that results from students collaborating with one another to identify desirable feelings, ideal behaviors to foster desired feelings, and how to respond effectively to situations when students are struggling to behave consistent with the charter. The meta-moment is a step-by-step process for increasing effective responding to emotion-provoking triggers. It involves the teacher working with the student to pause and take a deep breath, envision their best self, and select an emotional regulation strategy that will enable them to handle the situation in a way that reflects their best self. The instructional component of RULER is guided by the Feeling Words Curriculum, which integrates psychoeducation on emotions and specific skill-building activities with core academic curriculum (Brackett, Caruso, & Stern, 2006). The combination of the RULER tools and explicit instruction in EI skills is designed to enhance students’ positive emotional states and to improve students’ responses to situations in school that trigger negative emotions that, if unregulated, may manifest in more problematic behavior.

While SEL programs, like RULER, can be considered an inside-out approach that involves teaching students critical self-regulatory skills, there is also a need for an outside-in approach that involves creating a safe, predictable, and positive environment that influences key indicators of affective engagement (e.g., school connectedness, sense of safety).

School-Wide Positive Behavior Intervention and Supports (SWPBIS)

SWPBIS (Chap. 10) is a multitiered system that aims to establish a school culture in which clear positive behavioral expectations are established, taught, and recognized so that students and staff are able to support appropriate behavior from one another—thereby creating school environments that are predictable, consistent, safe, and positive (Sugai & Horner, 2002). SWPBIS focuses on preventing and reducing incidents of problem behavior that result in exclusionary discipline (office discipline referrals, suspension, detention) and to change student and staff perceptions of the climate of the school (e.g., safety, positivity; Sugai & Horner, 2010). Like other multitiered approaches, SWPBIS has specific practices that comprise its universal level of supports. Two randomized controlled trials provide strong evidence that universal SWPBIS reduces student office discipline referrals and suspensions, improves school climate, decreases teacher-reported social or behavioral problems, and leads to gains in academic performance (Bradshaw, Mitchell, & Leaf, 2010; Horner et al., 2009). SWPBIS has been adopted by over 21,000 schools nationwide (Horner & Sugai, 2015). The core elements of the universal level of SWPBIS are (1) establish three to five positively stated, teachable behavioral expectations, (2) post expectations in every setting to cue and prompt behavioral expectations, (3) develop a schedule for ongoing teaching of expectations, (4) create a motivation system to recognize and acknowledge students for exhibiting the behavioral expectations, (5) develop a progressive method of responding to problem behaviors with clearly defined categories of minor and major problem behaviors, and (6) gather data on disciplinary sanctions that could inform ongoing data-driven continuous improvement efforts. When combined, the evidence suggests that not only do incidences of behavioral problems decrease, but the use of exclusionary discipline sanctions that undermine student affective engagement dramatically decrease (Bradshaw, Waasdorp, & Leaf, 2012). Considering all the components of SWPBIS, it is helpful to understand which ones are likely to have implications for promoting students’ affective engagement.

The component that involves creating a motivation system to consistently recognize and acknowledge student behavior is likely a feature of SWPBIS that influences how students feel in school. Too often students receive a higher ratio of reprimands, corrections, and disapproval statements to positive interactions (Cook et al., 2017). A major focus of SWPBIS is for the adults in the building to put more effort and energy into paying attention to what students are doing “right” versus waiting and reacting to what students are doing “wrong.” When the adults spend more effort recognizing and acknowledging students for engaging in behavioral expectations, and privately correcting students misbehavior in a skillful manner, it is likely to cause students to feel more appreciated and valued by educators. Also, decreasing the use of exclusionary discipline practices in response to problem behavior appears to be another aspect of SWPBIS with implications for promoting affective engagement, especially in light of more recent research linking decreases in discipline disparities for certain subgroups of students (e.g., Black males) to improved school connectedness and belonging (Cook, Duong, et al., 2018). The universal level of SWPBIS provides a solid foundation for promoting desired behaviors that lead to safer and more orderly and positive school environments. Although SWPBIS has been shown to be effective at promoting indicators of student affective engagement, research has shown that when SWPBIS is integrated with other universal supports (e.g., SEL programming), even better social, emotional, and behavioral outcomes are likely to be achieved (e.g., Cook, Frye, et al., 2015).

Bullying Prevention

Considering the negative impact that bullying has on the psychological and emotional well-being of students and school climate as a whole (Cook et al., 2010), it is important to review bullying prevention as an element of universal programming that can promote student affective engagement. Ultimately, bullying prevention programs target the reduction of bullying which help students feel safer and more secure in their relationships with peers. Key findings have emerged from meta-analytic work on bullying prevention programs (Ttofi, Farrington, Lösel, & Loeber, 2011) that help inform what schools can do. On average, school-based bullying prevention programs are associated with over a 20% decrease in bullying and roughly a 17–20% decrease in victimization. In general, programs that include more components are more effective, such as the combination of parent meetings, firm and consistent disciplinary methods, improved playground supervision, and teaching important bystander behaviors to intervene on bullying. Ultimately, reductions in school-wide bullying and victimization create a relationally healthier environment in which students and staff feel more connected and affectively engaged in school (Olweus & Limber, 2010). There are also specific bullying prevention programs with evidentiary support, including Steps to Respect (Brown, Low, Smith, & Haggerty, 2011) and the Olweus Bullying Prevention Program (OBPP; Olweus & Limber, 2010). Moreover, other proactive supports such as SW-PBIS and SEL programming have been linked to reductions in bullying. Additionally, there is compelling evidence that effective reactive approaches, such as threat assessment, in response to incidents of potential aggression and violence, serve to improve indicators of student affective engagement in school.

Threat Assessment

Despite the low prevalence of serious acts of violence in schools, threats of violence are more common and pose significant concerns that can impact the affective engagement of students and overall school climate (Borum, Cornell, Modzeleski, & Jimerson, 2010). Threats of violence have been shown to occur in more than two-thirds of middle and high schools and slightly over a third of elementary schools (Nekvasil & Cornell, 2012). The Virginia Student Threat Assessment Guidelines (Cornell & Sheras, 2006) were developed to provide educators with a systematic approach to responding to student threats of violence to promote safer and more positive school environments. This approach involves training a team in the building to use a standardized protocol and decision-making guidelines to assess the degree of seriousness of a student’s threatening behavior and match the degree of threat to particular action. The threat assessment process goes beyond determining the seriousness of the threat by following through with intervention to resolve the problem or root cause underlying the threatening behavior. Although most threats are deemed to be transient (i.e., pose no serious danger to others), others may be more serious and require a more progressive and extensive assessment and intervention process. Findings have demonstrated a range of benefits linked to the implementation of the Virginia Student Threat Assessment Guidelines relevant to affective engagement, including reductions in student-reported fear about school violence, incidents of bullying, and exclusionary discipline practices, as well as increases in student reports of their feelings toward staff, fairer discipline approaches, and student perceptions of school safety (Cornell, Allen, & Fan, 2012; Cornell, Sheras, Gregory, & Fan, 2009; Nekvasil & Cornell, 2015).

Targeted Interventions to Address Low Affective Engagement

Within a multitiered framework, Tier 2 represents a key intermediary level of targeted interventions for students who express a need for support above and beyond Tier 1 alone. These students are ideally detected utilizing one or more proactive detection methods, such as universal screening, existing data on warning indicators (e.g., attendance, behavior discipline, grades), and/or a structured teacher nomination/referral process. In actual practice, the number of students who express a need for intervention depends on a host of factors, including exposure to environmental risk factors outside of school (e.g., poverty, community violence, domestic abuse) and the quality of universal supports that provide a foundation for prevention. Notwithstanding the likely variation across schools, a school can expect 10–25% of students being flagged as needing additional support beyond Tier 1. Once students are identified as having a need for intervention, it is incumbent upon schools to determine the most precise and appropriate intervention for the student. Thankfully, research has uncovered a menu of evidence-based Tier 2 interventions (Miller, Cook, & Zhang, 2018). However, it is fragmented, hindering effective practice in a number of ways. First, many educators typically know less about Tier 2 than Tiers 1 or 3 (Cook et al., 2010). Second, a review of the literature reveals that nearly all of the existing Tier 2 interventions have been researched and implemented only as stand-alone programs (Hawken, Adolphson, Macleod, & Schumann, 2009). There is an information management problem that impacts educators’ ability to know with whom particular interventions should be used to address issues such as low affective engagement that are leading to difficulties in school. Instead, a more promising approach is to develop a menu of Tier 2 interventions that provides wider coverage of supports that can be matched to students’ needs (Domitrovich et al., 2010).

The performance and acquisition model (PAM; e.g., Miller et al., 2018) is an example of a theory or paradigm that provides an efficient conceptualization of the root causes underlying students’ low affective engagement and leads to the selection of more precise and potentially effective interventions. The origins of PAM date back to Bandura’s (1969) book titled Principles of Behavior Modification where he integrated the concepts of performance versus acquisition deficits into a social learning theory account of behavior. It was not until the work of Gresham (1981) that these concepts began to emerge across a range of disciplines, including education (Gresham, Van, & Cook, 2006), psychology (Freedman, Rosenthal, Donahoe Jr, Schlundt, & McFall, 1978; Proctor & Dutta, 1995), and social work (Moote Jr, Smyth, & Wodarski, 1999), as he was the first to make the distinction between performance or skill deficits in the context of children’s social skill problems, and to articulate the differential implications for intervention that stem from this conceptualization. The clear conceptual definitions provided by Bandura combined with the work by Gresham (1981, 1986) helped scale these concepts to a point where it is now common language among both researchers and practitioners to refer to students as having acquisition (i.e., can’t do or skill problem) or performance (i.e., won’t do or will problem) deficits. While students with low affective engagement due to a hypothesized acquisition deficit would need an instructional intervention to acquire a missing skill or set of behaviors, those with a hypothesized performance deficit would need a motivational intervention. Indeed, existing evidence-based interventions can be classified as targeting acquisition deficits or performance deficits, which enables educators to more appropriately match a student to a likely effective intervention (Gresham et al., 2006). The following discusses acquisition- and performance-based interventions that can be implemented for students identified with low levels of affective engagement who are in need of intervention.

Acquisition-Based Interventions

Students with emotional regulation deficits can appear to have a performance deficit because, when they are well regulated, they are able to exhibit desired skills/behaviors. However, when the student becomes emotionally dysregulated (e.g., overly frustrated, intensely anxious), the student is unable to access those skills/behaviors and is motivated to escape or avoid the unwanted experience (Kring & Sloan, 2009). Indeed, enhancing emotional regulation skills through a combination of cognitive restructuring, coping techniques, and problem-solving strategies is the focus of many existing evidence-based interventions to improve the emotional competency and regulation of students. It is important to note that not all students with low affective engagement due to emotional regulation deficits struggle for the same reason.

There are a range of targeted, small group interventions that focus on enhancing student emotional regulation. These are often organized according to a specific emotion (e.g., anger, anxiety, or trauma) or more generally increasing emotional resilience in the face of adversity and stress. Coping Cat (Kendall & Hedtke, 2006) and the FRIENDS Program (Barrett, 2010), for instance, are two examples of targeted interventions with evidentiary support that are designed as a small group intervention for students who struggle with anxiety. Students with anxiety problems are likely to experience negative thoughts and feelings in school that lead to avoidance behaviors. The aim with both of these interventions is to enhance students’ emotional regulation skills, enabling them to manage and navigate school and life situations that would otherwise produce high levels of anxiety and impair engagement in social and academic activities. These programs accomplish this through teaching specific emotion coping skills, cognitive restructuring to take worrisome thoughts and make them more courageous and confident, developing specific plans to use when confronting anxiety-provoking situations, and ultimately being gradually exposed to a hierarchy of anxiety-provoking situations and being supported to use their learned skills to develop mastery over the situation.

Another example of an evidence-based emotional regulation targeted intervention is the Coping Power Program (Lochman & Wells, 2002a, 2002b). This intervention is designed for children who engage in aggressive behavior due to social-cognitive deficits and difficulties managing anger in response to peer interactions and adult requests. Coping Power includes a child component (34 group sessions) and a coordinated parent component (16 sessions) that are designed to be delivered over an extended period of time 12–18 months. Anger Replacement Training (ART; Glick & Goldstein, 1987) is another evidence-based small group intervention that targets improving students’ ability to manage anger and aggressive behavior. ART has three main components that inform its scope and sequence. The first is social skills training, which focuses on teaching students how to replace antisocial behaviors with prosocial ones. The second component emphasizes anger control by teaching students how to cope with anger-provoking situations in a nonaggressive way and develop more helpful and productive ways of thinking in response to the situations. Last, ART focuses on developing moral reasoning, which teaches students about the concepts of fairness, justice, and empathy.

Cognitive Behavioral Intervention for Trauma in Schools (CBITS; Jaycox, 2003) and the related Bounce Back (Langley, Gonzalez, Sugar, Solis, & Jaycox, 2015) interventions are group interventions for students experiencing traumatic stressors that impact their emotional and behavioral well-being. Students who are trauma-exposed often experience heightened emotions and lower rates of trust and belonging in school (Delaney-Black et al., 2002). While CBITS is primarily for middle and high school students, Bounce Back is designed for elementary students. Both interventions are grounded in the principles of cognitive behavior therapy and designed to reduce symptoms of emotional stress, anxiety/depression, and behavioral problems and to improve coping skills and academic engagement to produce better grades, attendance, and achievement.

Performance-Based Interventions

Performance-based interventions are intended for students with social, emotional, and behavioral problems who possess the skills and behaviors to meet the demands of the social and academic environment, but they are insufficiently supported and motivated to use the skills and behaviors they possess. Most students with low affective engagement are insufficiently motivated to exhibit desired, engaged behavior due to relationship problems (Furrer, Skinner, & Pitzer, 2014; Quin, 2017). As a result, for these particular students, evidence-based interventions that focus specifically on leveraging adult attention and relationship practices are a good fit. Encouraging and supporting students to feel more connected, respected, and valued in order to motivate them to exhibit the skills and behaviors they already possess (e.g., reading, writing, showing up to class on time, turning in work, staying on-task) are particularly well-suited as Tier 2 interventions for students with low affective engagement.

Check & Connect

Check & Connect (Chap. 1) is a popular evidence-based intervention that involves a designated mentor working with a student to improve engagement in school (Christenson et al., 2008). Indeed, much of the work on conceptualizing engagement as a critical construct in schools was born out of research on Check & Connect (Christenson et al., 2008). At its core, Check & Connect focuses on increasing student engagement via a close, secure, trusting relationship with a mentor who encourages the student to make meaningful changes to increase the student’s social and academic success. Mentors are trained in the systematic use of data to design personalized “connect” interventions. Check & Connect has four components that distinguish it from other mentor-based interventions: (1) assignment of mentor who works with students and families for a minimum of 2 years; (2) ongoing data checks to collect student-specific information on school adjustment, behavior, and educational progress; (3) delivery of timely interventions based on data to promote student engagement in school overall and specific learning environments; and (4) establishment of a trusting partnership with families to facilitate two-way communication (Christenson et al., 2008). Check & Connect emphasizes developing a healthy student-mentor relationship grounded in trust and mutual respect to promote affective engagement; in addition, Check & Connect is amenable to other timely interventions that help the program adapt to students’ needs. For example, one timely intervention could be focused on improving a relationship with a given teacher to improve sense of belonging and connection to a particular learning environment because data indicate the student is regularly skipping that class and the student reports feeling like the teachers does not want them in the class. Another example of a timely intervention targeting affective engagement could be on developing the capacity to manage boredom and frustration with learning new material in class, as disruptive classroom behavior has resulted in numerous office discipline referrals. Check & Connect has been linked to a number of favorable outcomes including decreases in truancy, tardies, behavior referrals, and dropout rates and increases in attendance, persistence in school, credits accrued, and school completion (Anderson, Christenson, Sinclair, & Lehr, 2004; Sinclair, Christenson, Evelo, & Hurley, 1998; Sinclair, Christenson, & Thurlow, 2005). In all of the cases, improvements in affective engagement are hypothesized to be a critical mediating variable through which Check & Connect exerts its influence on more objective, observable school-relevant outcomes.

Check in/Check-out (CICO)

CICO (Chap. 11) is intended for use with students with mild to moderate problem behavior, who demonstrate a need for intervention beyond Tier 1 supports alone. CICO is designed with the notion that students who do not respond to Tier 1 supports may need additional, structured interactions with a positive adult mentor or coach. This adult mentor provides increased access to positive interactions and reinforcing consequences contingent upon desired observable and measurable behavior (Maggin, Zurheide, Pickett, & Baillie, 2015). CICO includes the following components: (a) morning check-in with the mentor to receive positive attention and encouragement to exhibit desired behaviors; (b) completion of a daily behavior point card (DBPC) that is given to the student during the morning check-in and provides school personnel with a means for monitoring the extent to which students are meeting the behavioral expectations; (c) structured teacher feedback that is provided to students throughout the school day at regularly scheduled intervals and is delivered through both verbal interaction and point card ratings; (d) the afternoon check-out, during which the student’s point card is reviewed to determine the percentage of points earned with a reward such as verbal praise or a small tangible item delivered contingent on whether the student met their goal; and (e) a home component in which the student brings their point card home to be signed by a parent and returned the following day (Crone, Hawken, & Horner, 2010).

Several studies have demonstrated evidence indicating that CICO decreases problem behavior in students (Maggin et al., 2015; Wolfe et al., 2016). For example, a series of single-case experimental studies have found that CICO results in observable and meaningful reductions in problem behavior among elementary students (McDaniel & Bruhn, 2016; Miller, Dufrene, Sterling, Olmi, & Bachmayer, 2015), as well as decreases in internalizing behaviors (Hunter, Chenier, & Gresham, 2014). Other studies have adapted CICO by adding a peer-mediated component (Dart et al., 2015) and content to reduce internalizing problems (Cook, Xie, et al., 2015; Dart et al., 2015). These previous successful adaptations of CICO demonstrate the promise of structured mentoring interventions that involve attaching students to caring adults who provide positive interactions and reinforce consequences.

Positive Peer Reporting

Positive peer reporting (PPR) is an intervention designed to increase the social involvement of socially rejected and/or withdrawn students (Ervin, Miller, & Friman, 1996). Largely, PPR is designed to improve student sense of belonging with others in school as a way of increasing social standing and greater participation in classroom-based social activities. The aim of PPR is to alter the peer ecology to be more supportive by encouraging and incentivizing students to positively recognize and acknowledge particular peers. It places an emphasis on peers paying attention to one another in a prosocial manner to identify things a particular peer said, did, or achieved in order to recognize the peer. Research demonstrates that not only the recipients of the positive peer messages benefit by feeling a greater sense of connection and reporting more positive interactions with others, but there also appears to be a benefit to those giving the positive peer reports.

Considerations for Intervention

There are a few caveats that should be touched upon when contemplating what schools can do to improve student affective engagement. The first caveat is that schools must employ a data-driven decision-making process that emphasizes the selection of programs and practices that possess evidentiary support. The selection of evidence-based practices is not only critical to increase the probability of producing desired outcomes, but it also can serve as a preventative measure against potential educational waste (e.g., waste of time, money, and resources), iatrogenic effects (i.e., good intentions produce harm; e.g., Dishion, Kim, & Tein, 2015, and counterproductive efforts (Kazdin & Blasé, 2011)). The other caveat, and arguably most critical one, is to address what has been termed the implementation gap, which reflects the discrepancy between what research findings indicate works and what actually gets adopted and delivered in everyday school settings (Owens et al., 2014). Despite the established value of evidence-based practices to promote affective engagement narrowly and student engagement in school more broadly, their routine use in typical education contexts is limited, reducing their likely impact on student outcomes (Evans & Weist, 2004; Wilson, Gottfredson, & Najaka, 2001). Even when evidence-based practices (EBP) are selected for adoption in school settings, they are infrequently implemented with fidelity or sustained over time. This is concerning given the demonstrated link between implementation quality and student outcomes (Durlak & DuPre, 2008; Durlak & Weissberg, 2011). Thus, what is needed is for schools to systematically approach the exploration, preparation, active implementation, and sustainment of programs and practices if they want to produce lasting improvements in student affective engagement as a critical variable linked to academic success and a healthy, well-functioning school environment.

Conclusion

There is wide consensus that affective engagement represents a malleable dimension of the broader conceptualization of student engagement that is amenable to prevention and intervention efforts. Effective affective engagement prevention and intervention practices target specific indicators of affective engagement (e.g., relationships that enhance school connectedness), which ultimately reflect the emotion reaction students have in response to their experiences in school, and how they would communicate to others about how they feel about being in school. This chapter discussed a range of universal supports and targeted interventions schools can adopt and deliver to promote affective engagement as a critical student-level variable linked to positive academic outcomes. Given that affective engagement is a multidimensional construct unto itself, integrated approaches at both the universal (Tier 1) and targeted (Tier 2) level are warranted to address the different factors that drive high levels of student affective engagement. Research should continue to explore affective engagement as a critical target for prevention and intervention, as well as a key mediator through which prevention and intervention practices influence more objectively measured student outcomes, such as attendance, grades, and behavior.